OBJECTIVE To examine the association of smoking and lifestyle factors with pancreatic cancer death in the prospective design. METHODS Mortality from pancreatic cancer in regard to smoking, body mass index, physical activity, and alcohol, coffee and green tea intake, was studied in a prospective cohort of 30,826 inhabitants in Takayama, Japan. In 1992, each subject completed a self-administere...

The prevalence of erectile dysfunction (ED) in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) seemed high; however, large scale of population-based study was absent. We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the National Health Insurance system of Taiwan. The cohort included 29,042 male patients who were newly diagnosed with COPD. Patients were recruited between 2000...

For an M/G/1 queue with the objective of minimizing the mean number of jobs in the system, the Gittins index rule is known to be optimal among the set of non-anticipating policies. We develop properties of the Gittins index. For a single-class queue it is known that when the service time distribution is of type Decreasing Hazard Rate (New Better than Used in Expectation), the Foreground-Backgro...

Proportional hazards regression model assumes that the covariates affect the hazard function through a link function and an index which is a linear function of the covariates. Traditional approaches, such as the Cox proportional hazards model, focus on estimating the unknown index by assuming a known link function between the log-hazard function and covariates. A linear link function is often e...

Our goal was to examine the effect of area-level deprivation on patient survival time for seven major cancers - stomach, colon, liver, lung, breast, cervix, and thyroid cancer. Data on 10,902 subjects who were diagnosed with major cancers from 2010 and 2011 in Busan were collected regarding the survival time along with several important prognostic factors and an area-level deprivation index was...

BACKGROUND Inflammation may play an important role in cancer progression, and a higher systemic immune-inflammation index (SII) has been reported to be a poor prognostic marker in several malignancies. However, the results of published studies are inconsistent. MATERIALS AND METHODS A systematic review of databases was conducted to search for publications regarding the association between blo...

OBJECTIVES To examine the individual and combined associations of unhealthy behaviours (low/intermediate physical activity, consuming fruit and vegetables less than once a day, current smoking/short term ex-smoking, never/former/heavy alcohol drinking), assessed at start of follow-up, with hazard of disability among older French adults and to assess the role of potential mediators, assessed rep...

The radiological effects of mined tailings in some locations in Jos Plateau State have been estimated. The samples were collected from 14 different sites. The radio nuclides concentrations in the tailing samples were measured using gamma spectroscopy method. The average values of Ra 226 , Th 232 and K 40 obtained were 762.4Bqkg, 17258.3Bqkg and 5901.4Bqkg respectively. These radioactivity conce...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the utility of cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR)-derived myocardial strain measurement for the prediction of poor outcomes in patients with acute myocarditis. MATERIALS AND METHODS We retrospectively analyzed data from 37 patients with acute myocarditis who underwent CMR. Left ventricular (LV) size, LV mass index, ejection fraction and presence of myocardial late g...

Distributed Multimedia Information System Laboratory School of Computer Science, Florida International University Miami, FL 33199, USA Abstract Since the nineteenth century, the chemical process industries have developed rapidly not only in terms of degree of complexity and throughput, but also in potential hazards. Such hazards exist when chemicals undergo decomposition, polymerization or othe...